Frankenzones

I like this name: Frankenzones are Solaris Zones like the frankenstein monster, head and body doesn´t really match, and the admins´sewing thread to stich both together is the "-F" command. At the end of my presentation about "zones" i ask one question quite often: "What do you think: What will happen, when i take a sparse zone from Solaris x86 and move it to a Solaris SPARC server?". The answser is simple: "It will just run". Okay ... the answer is not quite correct, when you do the transplantion on the "detach/attach"-way, but even this method needs only the mentioned "-F" flag.

Jeff Victor tried this transplantation and blogs about the reasons, why such a hybrid beeing does not die right after the start. The most basic reason is: Sparse Zones are essentially bunchs of plattform-independent configuration files.

Okay, the method described is absolutly unsupported. Don´t call support service, when you have problems with such a frankenstein monster. But: Perhaps Solaris should have a third zone model. A plattform independent zone. A zone, that can easly migrated between architectures with the constraint that you have installed the matching binaries of your application on the server or on a shared filesystem.

Plattform independent virtualization ... how cool is this? Try this with your favourite hypervisor based virtualisation.